For this week, I wanted to talk about the creation of comic books, and how it relates to Software Process Management and Software Design. Within the article linked below, it describes the process of how a comic is created, and the steps needed to reach a final project. I specifically wanted to look more into this as the process is quite similar to how software is developed.

The second step is writing a plot, which is much like creating a backlog for your process, planning the beginning, middle and end of the process.

Then, its off to creating the art, which is a multi-step process, which is much like creating the code. For the artists, they need to sketch, then line, then ink and even maybe color the panels of the comic, which parallels how code will need a framework, then main code, supplemental code, and comments to build on top of each other. This process isn’t always in a predetermined order, and can vary from project to project.

And then theres editing and review. Everyone looks over the draft of the work they’ve made, and then tweaks whatever needs adjustments as needed. This process might lead to the recreation of art or code, depending on which process we’re discussing. Once a review gets a pass, they’re ready to finalize and move onto the last step, which is…

Publishing and marketing! Once you’re done, you send the finished copy of the work to consumers to receive, and perhaps you’ll even advertise it, if its not well-known. This can include things like advertisements, sponsorships, and even word of mouth.

The parallels of the dynamics in which these processes interest me a ton as someone whos also minoring in art, and wants to go into a digital design or digital-art focused field, whether it be game design or webcomics. It’s kinda awesome to see that theres a sort of venn diagram between my two passions, and that they can intersect.

EDIT: I meant to post this earlier before, but I had connectivity issues and it never posted when I thought it did. I only realized because a friend wanted to read my blog, haha. To clarify, this blog is intended for Week-12, and for both classes, not 13, it just was posted late due to issues. My apologies for this inconvenience.

From the blog CS@Worcester – You're Telling Me A Shrimp Wrote This Code?! by tempurashrimple and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

So, since the end of the semester is coming up, I should be posting weekly for the near future, so stay tuned for a lot from me! With this week of work, I have two topics I wanted to discuss, both related to each class I’m taking with Professor Wurst.

Firstly, on the Software Process Management side, I wanted to discuss how we’re using Scrum, and the way it’s set up. We’re using GitLab’s issue boards, dividing them amongst where they currently are in The Sprint, with stuff like the Issue Backlog, In Process, Needs Review, Finished, and so on so forth.

This setup reminded me a hell of a lot of Trello, a website/service I’ve been using for years now! And what’s funny is that I even mentioned this in class once, and the Professor said he used to as well for Scrum. My setup is quite different compared to the setup we have on GitLab, however, it still uses a similar Scrum/Kanban-esque setup.

Here’s the two boards I mainly use, one for School, and one for Commission work, as I freelance in art. With my Comm board, it is a bit more simpler, having using tags within lists as opposed to using a list per tag. As for my schoolwork board, it’s simply just listed with each course I’m taking and items of work I need to finish. It’s a very good tool, and I highly suggest it to anyone looking to utilize Scrum or even need a good tool to organize things.

Check it out here! https://trello.com/

As for the Software Design, I was curious what kind of file the .json’s we were using were. We have been using them to store data about students and members of the modified version of LibreFoodPantry’s backend. I’ve seen them used before many times in my times modding games before, usually they store data for configuration files.

So, to learn more, I found this blog from HubSpot: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/json-files, and honestly I think I get it a bit more now. They’re simply data storage files, able to store comma seperated values, objects, and arrays. They also support multiple data types, like integer, boolean, and strings.

So putting that into the context of configuration files, like for settings in games, it makes sense why they are used, due to integer and boolean values. If an option for a game has an on/off choice, a boolean data value to hold that information would make sense, as “true” would be on, and “false” would be off. As for how integers would be used, say you want to store the value of the volume the user wants while playing the game, that can be stored as an integer from 0-100.

All in all, it’s really interesting to learn more about filetypes I don’t know too much about, and I should look into more and how they are written, like .obj, .html, and .ini.

From the blog CS@Worcester – You're Telling Me A Shrimp Wrote This Code?! by tempurashrimple and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

So it’s been a hot second since I set this blog up, and I apologize for the silence. Been busy focusing on homework and figuring out my work situation.

But with that aside, I just wanna talk about my past with GitHub and repositories before this class. I’ve actually used GitHub many times before, because I collaborate with a modding community. We focus on modding a video game known as Luxor, a classic PC game from the 2000s that I’ll share gameplay of below.

A lot of effort has been put into these mods, and I’ve contributed to a lot of them, and even made my own. I have no recordings of it, unfortunately, but I swear it exists, haha.

Though as of recent, we’ve been discussing how to properly archive mods. For the longest time, we’ve been using our Discord server for modding to store them, but that poses an issue: Many people might not have access to Discord due to their countries, operating systems, or various other reasons.

This led to some people moving over to GitHub, which was one of my first times learning how it actually properly worked. Before this, I simply downloaded stuff from it, but I learned the basics of how to push and pull repositories and have a local clone to work on and collaborate with multiple people.

Currently one of the biggest projects being developed using GitHub is OpenSMCE (https://github.com/jakubg1/OpenSMCE) which is a game engine being built off of the Love2D engine to allow us to have an opensource engine to work off of for our mods, as opposed to the limited and clunky engine we use currently with the original game.

The reason I discuss this is actually because the new information I’m learning in these classes is inspiring me to help work on and learn the process of being in a team working on a software/engine development with Jakub, the developer of OpenSMCE. This has been an application I’ve been very excited to see have a full release, and being able to say I contributed to it and helped it reach that state would be amazing.

Hopefully as the semester goes on, with the lessons I’m learning about how to create an application as well as work in a collaborative environment, I’ll end up contributing to this project, and maybe I can even use this blog as a way to discuss the ongoing developments and issues we’ve been facing with the development of OpenSMCE. It would be interesting, and I will probably reach out to Jakub within the next week about it.

Anyways, that’s all I have for this week, until next time!

-Tempura

From the blog CS@Worcester – You're Telling Me A Shrimp Wrote This Code?! by tempurashrimple and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.